WoW’s Season of Discovery is almost here, and Blizzard has shared some details on what players can expect from the upcoming season regarding its servers and PvP faction balancing. Much to the delight of fans, there will be some helpful changes and tweaks to make the season run smoothly.
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Fewer Realms Aim to Avoid The Need For “Disruptive Character Migration Options”
The news comes via a Blizzard Forum post by Tom Ellis, a senior producer for WoW’s Server and Live Ops team, who detailed the team’s approach to servers for the upcoming Season of Discovery.
He begins by detailing how the launch of Classic Hardcore and tech deployed in patch 1.14.4 allowed them to increase the player capacity of its classic servers significantly. As a result, it helped to avoid “disruptive character migration” as realm populations shifted.
With that in mind, the team plans to “repeat this process” for Season of Discovery. The season will launch with fewer servers available but with the ability to support more players, with the team actively managing sizes to help ensure realms are equally populated, with the option to add more realms if needed. They also plan to announce the realm names very soon. However, don’t expect queues to be gone entirely, with Ellis saying that you might see “sporadic queues as the populations spread out and we ensure realm sizes remain roughly equal.”
Along with this, Ellis also details how the team will be handling PvP servers with the introduction of faction balancing. This system will make it so PvP servers in Season of Discovery are evenly balanced so one faction doesn’t dominate another, but as a result, Ellies did point out that there is a “very real likelihood that faction selection may be temporarily limited on that realm” if the balance becomes too tilted to one side. However, he also made clear the teams will change course and take on feedback if and when issues arise. He did not mention how realm dominance and balance will be determined in the post.
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Of course, we will need to wait and see how these changes play out, but we imagine players will be happy with these additions and tweaks for the season, with comments on the post generally being ones of praise and thanking the team for listening to player feedback and requests.
Now, it’s just a case of waiting for November 30 for the season to kick off, and players will be able to dive into a new style of WoW Classic.
